Category: Article
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Why do Canadian First Nations have casinos?
The coach from Calgary to Banff didn’t just pass through prairie and forest. There were a few settlements on the way too, one of which was a First Nations* village of the Stoney Nakoda, its buildings scattered across a wide area. One of the buildings, I noticed, was a casino. This surprised me. I had…
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Why do towns and villages in France look so much older than the ones in Wales?
One of the great appeals of travelling in France is its antique towns and villages. Anyone looking up places to visit in France online can easily end up wandering among a plethora of pictures of castles and timber-framed houses that look straight out of a fairytale. I saw these places myself, in Foix and, to…
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Why are white palm fronds painted on Amazigh houses?
Tiout was quite an ordinary village, but in a way I found very appealing. It was so ordinary that it formed a perfect archetype of what an Amazigh village should be, with its lush palmery, half-pristine, half-ruined kasbah, and hilltop marabout. The stripes of purple or blue paint that outlined the occasional doorframe and window…
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Why is Singapore so militarised?
Singapore has a number of notable elements. There’s the grey business of the skyscrapers, the glitzy consumerism of the shopping complexes, and the bright colours of the tourist magnets like Sentosa and the Gardens by the Bay. It seems unexpected, then, that another notable feature is the number of military sites. There was one just…
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How much Korean cultural influence is there in Thailand?
In the midst of Bangkok’s teeming ecosystem of adverts, all over the walls of the metro and infesting the huge shopping centres, something occurred to me. Thai people can have a wide range of skin tones, but the people grinning and holding up products in the adverts were exceptionally pale. This could be attributed to…
Wandering/Wondering 